Can anyone help with this Ghost 2003 problem?

[packman 0]

I've just re-formatted and reinstalled all my OS and core apps. I normally use Ghost 2003 to backup all the core stuff in my root partition but, this time, instead of using a number of CD-RWs for that backup, I decided to use a DVD+RW instead. My writer drive supports DVD+RWs, as does Ghost 2003, apparently.

 

Because with my particular writer drive the disc gets prematurely ejected before a subsequent integrity check on the backup data can be automatically performed, I opted to do this check via a separate operation. Ghost caters for this. The check proceeded (in PC-DOS, of course) but, at the end (while still in PC-DOS), Ghost flashed up a message inviting me to either place another disc in the drive and pressing OK, or to browse to somewhere else (DOS-type structure), or to Cancel.

 

Well, I required none of these, as my backup had only been 3GB and had taken up only about half the DVD. I tried one or two of these options but, in every case, the procedure failed and Ghost of course then rebooted back into Windows. Although the DVD is, in all probability, perfectly fine (the log said the backup had been successful), the integrity check therefore failed and I'm left with not knowing the real integrity of the data on that backup.

 

Has anyone else met this problem and, if so, have you found a solution to it? My edition of Ghost has been fully updated with the latest downloads from Symantec.

 

My OS is Win2kSP4. The writer is an NEC1100A. I've had the writer for about 3 years and it's worked fine for pretty well everything. These 'manual'integrity checks, in Ghost, have hitherto worked fine with a batch of CD-RWs.

[packman 0]

In furtherance to what I've written above, I've subsequently run Ghost Explorer on the supposed image file on the DVD. Ghost Explorer is provided in this and later versions, as I understand it, and gives a presentation rather like Windows Explorer.

 

It's just as well that I did, as the contents were:

 

CDR00001.GHO

CDR00002.GHO

 

and attempting to open either of these produced absolutely nothing.

 

Normally, CDR00001.GHO, etc are the names that Ghost gives to successive spanned backups, before the user assigns actual filenames. I know this from past experience with CD-RWs. To find two in this instance is a little weird, as all of the uncompressed core software would fit on to about half the DVD surface, so it wouldn't require any spanning. There is, I seem to recall, a 2GB limit of some sort on file sizes in Ghost but the alternative backup file that I've put into a reserved HD partition shows a file size of 1.6GB (apparently), when looked at with Ghost Explorer.

 

Could it be that the 12 minutes that Ghost spent in PC-DOS apparently writing the image on the DVD disc was, in fact, a disc formatting sequence, and that perhaps the two above 'files' are two formatted zones? If so, why TWO zones? And, if so, where would I go from here? Repeat the imaging exercise, on that same DVD?